From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Carpet-Bomb Filmmaking
"Fahrenheit 9/11" feeds the smugness of bicoastal elites.
Michael Moore is right where he wants to be: top o' the world. Hollywood gave him his Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine," a French film festival gave him a prize for "Fahrenheit 9/11," and the entire Republican firmament is raving at him for making a duplicitous movie about George Bush that is packing them in as a general-release feature. "Fahrenheit 9/11" has put him over the top, all right.
I saw it last Friday night in Manhattan's Gramercy Park neighborhood, and when it was over a full house cheered and applauded. Moore takes his politically prepackaged audience on a roller-coaster ride, starting them on TV-studio outtakes of administration officials just before they're about to go on television--Bush, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft. Some are getting daubed with pancake makeup. They all look a little vacant, as everyone does in the minutes before airtime. It's a yuk.
Then he's into the morning of September 11 in downtown New York--showing clips of the dust and debris-filled air, but in melodramatic slow-motion, a gratuitous slathering-on of emotion that I haven't seen in any other 9/11 documentary. My sense was that even this audience wasn't wholly comfortable with what he had done here. No matter; he gets them off the hook when he introduces the war in Afghanistan by imposing the opening credits and music from the popular 1960s TV Western "Bonanza." A big laugh.
The mood darkens when Moore's camera (or someone's camera) gets inside Walter Reed hospital in Washington, showing military amputees from the Iraq war. The rush of raw images is disturbing, no matter what your views, but the politics are brought quickly into focus by a thin soldier with nerve damage, who has a message: He used to be a Republican, but when he gets out, he's going to work hard to elect Democrats. The tour through the amputee ward at Walter Reed is just a set-up, a shtick, to deliver an anti-Bush punch line.
Sometimes Moore himself delivers the punch lines, but more often he programs his film's characters to deliver them. Even if they're dead. In the movie's big moment, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, sitting surrounded by her family, reads his last letter home in which, among other things, he says that he hopes everyone will vote to defeat George Bush. By this point, it's hard not to notice that the theater smells of stale popcorn.
Virtually everyone in "Fahrenheit 9/11"--and it doesn't matter which side they're on--is a dupe or a stupe in Michael's world. A long segment features a Fresno peace group, supposedly infiltrated by an undercover cop. Filming in their meeting room, Moore makes them look like goofy, witless innocents, and just so you don't miss the point, he runs tinkly soda-pop music beneath their scenes.
A young Oregon state highway patrolman looks like a fool, because he's standing guard on a highway in the middle of nowhere. Residents of Tappahannock, Va., commenting on a bureaucratic snafu over their town's name, sound like bewildered country yokels.
Moore's on-camera characters are invariably lower middle class and inarticulate. In fact, no one is physically attractive or stylish, which allows Moore's big-city target audience to stay inside its normal film-going comfort zone of smirking condescension.
The U.S. soldiers who speak onscreen in Iraq come across as bloodless killers with Southern accents. They sound stupidly unfeeling about the war's destruction. It wasn't clear to me that even this audience was in sync with the filmmaker's willingness to make a mockery of American soldiers. Moore's misanthropy is equal opportunity; he shows a greasy white guy in Flint, Mich., with a tattoo on his arm, whose thoughts on domestic security are that you can't trust anyone anymore, even people you know. That got a big laugh. All the people in Moore's beloved Flint--which appears in "Fahrenheit" as a few bombed-out housing blocks--are either dopey white trash or oppressed blacks. Two Marine recruiters walking around a U.S. shopping center are manipulative and opportunistic. They're made to look bad.
To make some point about domestic security, he shows a passenger's encounter at check-in with an improbable airport security guard--a befuddled, older woman in glasses, curly white hair and a Midwestern accent. Moore doesn't give this woman the courtesy of identifying where she works. She's nowhere.
Even the Iraqi victims in Baghdad are props. A baby's corpse is lifted from a dumpster, bloodied limbs are shown, people wail--but in a succession of quick frames. Moore never spends any time with these people. They just, so to speak, blow by.
In a sequence on the U.S.'s allies, Romania is depicted with a movie-stock Dracula figure (these are the people who freed themselves from Ceausescu), and Morocco is represented by monkeys scampering along the ground. That got a laugh, but not a big one.
It's hard to know whether Moore's filmmaking is sloppy or some sort of sleight-of-hand. Other than the Weinstein brothers and Moore, the film's official credits list only 15 people. Either "Fahrenheit" is a tape-and-paste job, or some colleagues have gotten short shrift. The director's cut must be huge.
Weirdly, the only people Moore seems to treat with simple respect are politicians who ape his agenda, such as Sen. Byron Dorgan and Rep. Jim McDermott. By "Fahrenheit's" end, you conclude that Moore sees the world as full of mostly useful idiots, including the audience (and probably the audience cheering him at the Oscars).
This is moviemaking for bicoastal cultural elites. They get to look down at the opposition, at "Bush," but they also get to feel superior to their own foot soldiers in the proletarian heartland. With no need to distinguish truth or detail, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is moral carpet-bombing from 10,000 feet.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
